“History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”
–David McCullough

In California bill, SB48, hopefully to be signed by Governor Jerry Brown, seeks to help correct a longstanding and bitter historical wrong. No…not the absence of gay history in the classroom…

School textbooks evolve, just like the society the pages describe. The contributions of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and women – all missing or minimized in decades past – are now more fully and accurately portrayed in textbooks and other instructional materials. The role of gays and lesbians also deserves fair treatment in lessons about the development of this state and nation.

That’s the simple and forceful premise behind a bill, SB48, now on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. But the idea of highlighting gay people’s contributions still draws controversy in a state where same-sex marriage remains illegal and a political wedge issue. In this case, the opposition is misguided about what’s at stake.

Ostensibly the bill is intended to improve awareness of the contributions of gay people to history. That’s a worthwhile goal in and of itself and as the second paragraph above notes, the usual suspects are raising a ruckus about it. But positive images of gay people are not what the opposition is afraid of. Here, in the Catholic Reporter, the real problem is daintily addressed…

Bishops oppose bill on gays in textbooks

William May, chairman of a California-based group called Catholics for the Common Good, said in a June 16 letter to the head of the state Assembly’s Education Committee, that problems around bullying are not going to be solved by “cosmetically sexualizing social studies” in the state’s public schools.

He said unjust discrimination against gays and lesbians “is an important fact that must be taught and not forgotten, but this bill will not affect that.” He also said the bill’s language was “so vague, and subject to such broad interpretation, that it can only lead to confusion, conflict and the potential for complaints and litigation.”

Note the formulation “unjust discrimination”. There’s the problem. Here’s the naked fear of this bill:

U.S. shifts policy on same-sex bankruptcies

The U.S. Justice Department has dropped its opposition to joint bankruptcy petitions filed by same-sex married couples in a victory for supporters of gay marriage.

The policy change is the latest setback for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which has come under increasing pressure since the Obama administration said in February that it would no longer defend its constitutionality.

The filing by the Obama Department of Justice goes beyond simply bowing out of the case…it makes a dazzlingly clear cut case that DOMA is an unconstitutional attack on a suspect minority that has suffered a long history of legal and social persecution:

Justice Dept. brief against DOMA lauded as ‘watershed moment’

LGBT rights supporters are heralding a recently filed legal brief against the Defense of Marriage Act – the first of its kind against the anti-gay law from the Obama administration – as a landmark document that will aid in bringing about the end of DOMA.

…

Notably, the brief recalls the U.S. government’s role in discriminating against LGBT people in its description of the ways in which LGBT people have received different treatment over the course of history. The Justice Department recalls that former President Eisenhower signed an executive order adding “sexual perversion” as grounds for dismissal for federal employees.

“The federal government enforced Executive Order 10450 zealously, engaging various agencies in intrusive investigatory techniques to purge gays and lesbians from the civilian workforce,” the brief states. “The State Department, for example, charged ‘”skilled” investigators’ with ‘interrogating every potential male applicant to discover if they had any effeminate tendencies or mannerisms,’ used polygraphs on individuals accused of homosexuality who denied it, and sent inspectors to ‘every embassy, consulate and mission’ to uncover homosexuality.’”

The full text of the brief is Here (PDF). It also reads in part:

In order to identify gays and lesbians in the civil service, the FBI “sought out state and local police officers to supply arrest records on morals charges, regardless of whether there were convictions; data on gay bars; lists of other places frequented by homosexuals; and press articles on the largely subterranean gay world”

The United States Postal Service (“USPS”), for its part, aided the FBI by establishing “a watch list on the recipients of physique magazines, subscrib[ing] to pen pal clubs, and initiat[ing] correspondence with men whom [it] believed might be homosexual.” The mail of individuals concluded to be homosexual would then be traced “in order to locate other homosexuals.”

Now consider this, and ask yourself how many times you have heard comparisons of the struggles of gay Americans and black Americans denounced because gays never were sold into slavery, never had to ride the back of the bus, never were denied the right to vote. Or comparisons with antisemitism denounced because gays were never herded into extermination camps. How many times have you heard the struggle for gay equality dismissed as the pastime of privileged rich white men. How often have we heard, and still hear, that laws protecting gay people from discrimination are unnecessary, are really just about seeking social approval.

Below is how Mad Magazine looked at our struggle back in 1971. I include this to show what the popular view of our struggle was so shortly after Stonewall, not to be pointing a finger specifically at Mad. This was how our struggle was commonly viewed back then and Mad like a lot of publications is way, way nicer to their gay readers nowadays.

Mad #145, Sept ‘71, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”

Forgive us if we’re more concerned with Indians and Blacks… So easy to say, when the shear brutality of anti-gay persecution was so completely unknown to most Americans. But of course to know that history they would have only had to look…

The Last Police Raid on Gays of Fire Island

…my mind went back to starting as a reporter at the daily Long Island Press in the 1960s covering police and courts when a Suffolk County custom was the annual police raid on the gay communities of Fire Island, a barrier beach on the Atlantic and a diverse summertime haven for New Yorkers.

Boatloads of Suffolk police would make a night-time assault on Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. Prisoners were dragged off in manacles and charged with morals violations. All would plead guilty, most being from the city and frightened about casting their lot with Long Island locals. And, no question, this was a variant of a witch hunt. Police stressed, in notifying the press about the arrestees, where they worked and what they did. They wanted to get these guys in trouble.

But looking at what was happening to us was exactly the problem. There was no news footage back then of gays being dragged off in manacles because we were considered too disgusting to even talk about in family newspapers, let alone on TV. And when we were talked about, it always had to be in the most reassuringly scary and disgusted terms…

We had to fight just to be seen, before we could fight to have our stories told.

Some years ago I watched a documentary on Logo about the gay history of Fire Island. During a time when same-sex couples risked arrest for dancing together the police would patrol the streets around a club called the Botel and arrest random young men as they left. On those nights the bartenders would get the word somehow and warn people not to leave the club alone, but go out in large groups. Typically the police would arrest at least twenty gays. There was a large telephone pole near the Botel, that had a chain fastened to it, and as the police would randomly arrest gay men as they left the Botel they would cuff them to the chain…one by one…until they had their twenty for that night.

No, we never rode the back of the bus. We rode the boat back to the mainland and to jail. We sat in the cells of all the 50 states where sodomy laws put us. As Neil Miller documented in his book, Sex-Crime Panic in sentences of indefinite length in special wings in mental hospitals created specifically for homosexuals. As David Carter documented in his book Stonewall, bars and restaurants could have their licenses revoked if they served us. And as David K. Johnson documented in his book The Lavender Scare, we were relentlessly witch hunted in the 1950s because even more then the communist threat we were viewed by the republican party as a useful tool to play wedge politics against the democrats with. And as the Obama Justice Department brief states…

State and local law also has been used to prevent gay and lesbian people from associating freely. Liquor licensing laws, both on their face and through discriminatory enforcement, were long used to harass and shut down establishments patronized by gays and lesbians…State and local police also relied on laws prohibiting lewdness, vagrancy, and disorderly conduct to harass gays and lesbians, often when gay and lesbian people congregated in public… Similar practices persist to this day…

Yes…as a matter of fact…

Police disciplined over Eagle bar raid

Ten Atlanta police officers lied about events surrounding a controversial 2009 raid at a Midtown gay bar, according to an investigative report released this week, and the department on Thursday demoted a commander and placed seven others on administrative duty. Two officers previously were fired.

…

The 343-page report confirmed complaints raised in the lawsuit that officers had deleted call logs, photographs and cell phone text messages, which a federal judge had ordered turned over to the lawyers for men who had filed suit. The report said the officers lied when asked about people being shoved to the floor, city ordinance violations that were witnessed and phone use that night.

Decades since Stonewall and it’s still going on. But at least now there can’t be an expectation that we will endure it quietly. And that has consequences. Bigotry no longer has the free reign it use to have over us. Sometimes we win a few. The closet as it turned out, not only kept us hidden, it kept the crimes against us hidden.

It is the prospect of that history of anti-gay persecution becoming commonly known and understood that terrifies the anti-gay industrial complex. Because then the need for laws protecting us from discrimination becomes crystal clear. Because then the hatred at the root of groups like NOM and the Family Research Council becomes sickeningly obvious. Because then it becomes hard, obscene even, to argue as Maryland Delegate Jay Walker did that,

“I cannot fathom a day in which I will be told which water fountain I can use but at the same time the gay and lesbian community had so many more things that they could participate in that African Americans and immigrants couldn’t.”

We sure did…

Across the country there was an alarming vagueness in legal definitions as to who might be classified as a sexual psychopath. State laws defined a sexual psychopath as someone who had a “propensity” to commit sex offenses (Michigan and Missouri) or who “lacked the power to control his sexual impulses” (Massachusetts and Nebraska). In most states, however, authorities couldn’t just pluck such a person off the street and label him a sexual psychopath. In Alabama, for instance, the suspect had to be convicted of a sex crime first. Under the proposed Iowa legislation, such a person had to be charged with – but not necessarily convicted of – a “public offense.” In Nebraska, on the other hand, a suspect didn’t have to be charged; all that was needed were certain facts showing “good cause” and the process of classification as a sexual psychopath could begin. And in Minnesota, the only requirements were a petition by a county attorney and an examination by “two duly licensed doctors of medicine.”

Whatever their individual wordings, such laws were intended to bring about the indefinite detention of dangerous or socially undesirable people. In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists ruled that he was “cured” or at the very least no longer posed a threat to society.

Despite their good intentions, sexual psychopath laws invariably took a catch-all approach to sexual offenses. The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between violent and non-violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless “sexual deviates” and dangerous sex criminals. An adult homosexual man who had sex with his lover in the privacy of his bedroom was as deviant as a child murderer. A person who had a pornographic book or photograph hidden in a night table faced the same punishment as a rapist. All these people were lumped into one category – that of the sexual psychopath – and could be incarcerated in a state hospital indefinitely.

New York lawyer and judge Morris Ploscowe, one of the most prominent critics of sexual psychopath laws at the time, found that these were most often used to punish and isolate minor offenders rather then dangerous predators. In Minnesota, which enacted its sexual psychopath law in the ’30s, some 200 people were committed to state hospitals in the first ten years of the law’s existence, according to Ploscowe. Most were detained for homosexual activity, not for being hard-core sex criminals.

-Neal Miller: Sex-Crime Panic

So many more things we could participate in…

Like the federal government, state and local governments have long discriminated against gays and lesbians in public employment. By the 1950s, may state and local governments had banned gay and lesbian employees, as well as gay and lesbian “employees of state funded schools and colleges, and private individuals in professions requiring state licenses.” … Many states and localities began aggressive campaigns to purge gay and lesbian employees from government services as early as the 1940s.

This employment discrimination was interrelated with longstanding state law prohibitions on sodomy; the discrimination was frequently justified by the assumption that gays and lesbians had engaged in criminalized and immoral sexual conduct…

–Defendant’s Brief In Opposition To Motions To Dismiss, Golinski v. Office Of Personnel Management.

At one time all fifty states had sodomy laws but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority. At one time bars and restaurants were forbidden from serving known homosexuals but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority. At one time the Post Office with help from the FBI tracked down suspected homosexuals for government witch hunters but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority. At one time homosexuals were rounded up and held indefinitely in mental hospitals, could have their children taken away from them, could loose their jobs, their homes, their professional licenses, their freedom, but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority.

1777 – A committee works on a revised set of criminal law for Virginia. Thomas Jefferson and other liberals attempt to have the death penalty for sodomy replaced by castration for men and boring a hole through the nose of a woman. The committee rejects their suggestion and retains the death penalty.

Nothing to see here…move along…

That is why our history must never be taught. As long as this history, which is still being uncovered and documented, remains hidden the haters can keep right on posturing as the aggrieved parties whenever we compare our struggle to that of other hated minorities, and their bar stool prejudices toward us to their bar stool prejudices toward others. They can keep insisting that we do not need the protection of the courts because we are not a suspect class and were never really persecuted to begin with. That we are merely a small group of privileged mostly rich white men who are seeking special rights at everyone else’s expense. That they are not bigots whose concern was never about anything more then that their hatreds always have free reign over the lives of those they hate. Forgive us if we’re more concerned with Indians and Blacks. That is why our history must never be taught.

This came across my screen some time ago while browsing The Stranger blog, and I’ve been meaning to write about it…

The thing I was most excited about in the writing of this article is the discovery (thanks to the good folks at Horizon Books) of a poem from 1892 titled “Jeff and Joe. A True Incident of Creede Camp, Colorado” that was published in an 1897 collection of cowboy poems titled Jim Marshall’s New Pianner and Other Western Stories by William Devere, the self-described “Tramp Poet of the West.” The poem is an exceptional artifact. Devere writes of a pair of cowhands he knew at Creede Camp:

Jeff, yer see, thought well of Joe—
Knowed him thirty years or so,
Pal’d together down below.
Joe liked Jeff and Jeff liked Joe,
An’ through all the changin’ years,
Sheered each other’s smiles and tears.Worked together, tooth and nail,
Punchin’ cattle up the trail;
Dealt the old thing; tackled bluff;
Each one blowed the other’s stuff,

The cowboys enjoy a fairly open, long-term committed homosexual relationship…

Uncovering the story of gay people throughout the pages of time is a kind of archeology.   Our past has been carefully buried by layer upon layer of prejudice, hate and oppression.   Sometimes, as in the case of ancient poems, the burial involves nothing more then the deft changing of a pronoun by some past editor or copyist.   A monk, carefully transcribing an ancient text, happens upon evidence of the sin of Sodom and covers it over with a few strokes of the quill, and a same-sex love is thereby turned into another opposite-sex one.   The original manuscript can then be safely burned later, perhaps after saying a few prayers.   Most of Sappho, the greatest poet of ancient times, is lost to us now as is an entire book of letters written by the philosopher Aristotle to Hephaestion, the lover of Alexander.

That erasing of our history continues to this day.   The web page for the upcoming movie, Young Alexander the Great, advertises its telling the tale of Alexander’s teen years thusly:

Alexander is at school, where he lives and studies with other boys, the sons of Macedonian noblemen. Their tutor is the legendary philosopher, Aristotle. The atmosphere is friendly but competitive, however, Alexander experiences all the problems a modern teenager has today, be it bullies and cheats at school, or winning the affections of beautiful girls.

Our history, the poetry of our hearts across the ages, is carefully erased so we can cease to be human beings in their eyes, so we can be their convenient scapegoats.   Cowboys?   Gay cowboys?     In John Wayne’s west?   Are you nuts or something?

Joe gets sick and dies, after being assured by Jeff that he lived a good life, as a cowboy should, and that there’ll be no “gospel sharks” preaching or praying at his funeral. Devere pays tribute to the grieving Jeff:

An’ as for Jeff—well, I may say,
No better man exists to-day.
I don’t mean good the way you do—
No, not religious—only true.
True to himself, true to his friend;
Don’t quit or weaken to the end.
An’ I can swear, if any can,
That Jeff will help his fellow man.
An’ here I thank him—do you see?
For kindness he has shown to me.
An’ This I’ll say, when all is o’er,
An’ Jeff has crossed to t’other shore,
I only hope that you and me
May stand as good a chance as he.

That was written by someone who had actually lived the American west during the period later idealized by a Hollywood where any mention of homosexuality was prohibited by the Hayes code.     We know there was no casual acceptance of homosexuality in the American frontier because Hollywood told us so.   And it still does.   One year after Brokeback Mountain came unexpectedly and uncomfortably close to winning best picture, Hollywood gave us an updated 3:10 To Yuma.   So as to quickly reassure the movie going public that homosexuals, if they existed at all west of the Mississippi, were psychotic killers the guy in the white hat always dispatched at the end of the film, one was tastefully added to the remake.   Micheal Jensen at After Elton describes it thusly…

The new film 3:10 to Yuma delivers yet another coded gay villain to add to the already crowded pantheon. A remake of the 1957 film starring Glenn Ford, Russell Crowe plays the role of outlaw Ben Wade. Christian Bale co-stars as Dan Evans, the down on his luck Civil War veteran desperate enough to try to bring Wade to justice despite the near certainty he’ll die trying. And Ben Foster stars as Charlie Prince, Wade’s villainous henchman and second in command who oozes gay subtext.

To be perfectly clear, Foster’s part is actually rather small, so don’t expect GLAAD to issue a press release taking director James Mangold to task for denigrating the gay community. That being said, there is also no mistaking that Foster’s character is indeed coded as gay and is done so to make him even more unsettling to filmgoers since being a murderous sociopath apparently isn’t bad enough.

When we first see Charlie Prince, he is astride his horse, one hand draped delicately over the other with the limpest wrist this side of the Mississippi river. He is by far the nattiest dresser in the entire cast, and if that isn’t mascara he’s wearing when we first meet him then I’m Buffalo Bill.

Foster’s casting tells us a great deal about what Mangold intended for the character. He is a slight man, probably best known as Angel in X-Men: The Last Stand and as Russell, Claire’s sexually ambiguous boyfriend in Six Feet Under. Macho isn’t a word likely to often be used in describing Foster.

Within the first five minutes of Prince’s appearance onscreen, one character refers to him as “missy” and “Charlie Princess,” a nickname usually not uttered to his face, but apparently widely used behind his back. Naturally, Prince is utterly ruthless, killing anyone who gets in his way, and showing no emotion at all – not unless he’s interacting with Ben Wade, who clearly makes Charlie swoon.

You know how this ends…right?

The film’s climax is appropriately dire, with bullets flying every which way. Of course, the odds against Evans’ succeeding seem impossibly high, and I won’t give away the ending (except to say that it is improbable at best), but of course Charlie Prince does figure prominently.

He arrives at the very end, riding in to rescue Wade from Evans’ heterosexual clutches. Naturally, that involves putting a bullet into Evans, an act that so infuriates Wade that he in turn pumps Prince full of bullets himself. Shocked at the actions of the man he adores, the dying Prince looks like nothing so much as a dog being put down by his master.

As Wade watches Prince die, I couldn’t shake the feeling that thanks to the influence of Evans, he now sees Prince clearly for the first time. It is only then that he understands what friendship between two men should be like and it doesn’t involve what Prince yearned for. He may have been an outlaw and a murderer, but make no mistake – that isn’t the reason Prince has to die at the end of the film.

Brokeback Mountain uncovered a painful part of the story of gay people in the American west…if not the frontier days.   It was a surprise hit, and that outraged the Hollywood good old boys club.   In the weeks before the Oscar ceremonies, some members of the Motion Picture Academy, some of whom owed their careers to the closeted gays in the business, bellyached openly that not only were they not going to vote for Brokeback Mountain, they weren’t going to even bother watching it, a violation of Academy rules.   “If John Wayne were alive he’d be rolling in his grave,” said Ernest Borgnine.

Clearly, something had to be done…

What surprised most of all is that the homophobic subtext isn’t a leftover relic from the original 3:10 that Mangold felt compelled to include. That would’ve been bad enough, but instead almost all of the coded gay aspects in the remake were introduced by either Mangold or the film’s assorted screenwriters.

In the original movie, Prince is played by character actor Richard Jaeckel (The Dirty Dozen, Starman). At no point is his character called “missy” or referred to as “Charlie Princess”. In the saloon scene where Wade flirts with Emmy, Prince also spends time talking with her. Nor is it made to seem that Prince is pining over his boss, jealous over the attention he gives to others. At one point, he even discusses his having a wife.

One thing does remain the same in both movies: Prince dies in each, but in the 1957 version it’s at the hands of Evans, not Wade. Thus there is no message sent that Prince is being punished for his “queer” transgressions against Wade (which aren’t even present).

[Emphasis mine…] Perhaps that stopped John Wayne rolling in his grave.   On the other hand, maybe John Wayne would have appreciated a good story and good acting that broadened the audience’s understanding of their neighbors in this life.   Uber patriot he may have been but I don’t recall anyone ever suggesting he was a bigot.   And he starred in at least one western based on a novel written by an openly gay man.   It was William Dale Jennings‘   The Cowboys.   If Wayne read the book prior to making the movie, he had to know about it’s gay subtext.   In fact, the book was a source of controversy to publishers back in 1971 because of it, which sorta makes it surprising it was made into a movie at all, even allowing for the fact the gay subtext was cleanly erased from it.

As you read the story of Wil Anderson,   a small rancher so desperate to get his herd to market after all his men ran off on a gold rush, that he let’s himself get talked into taking on the town’s teenagers as help, it’s easy to just miss the sweet, and at the end of it tragic, teenage love story happening right there in front of you.   It is between Slim and Charlie Schwartz, and it’s tragic because in the end Charlie is shot by the bandits who try to steal Wil’s herd and Slim is the one who carries his dying friend’s body back to the wagon.

Slim and Charlie arrive at Wil Anderson’s ranch with the town’s other young teenagers and instantly Anderson picks up on the fact of their close friendship.     Slim looks to Wil to the the most mature, sensible kid in the bunch, while Charlie, who has a game leg, doesn’t look like he’ll make the cut.   Wil doesn’t want to take on a cripple and right away Charlie seems a bit of a hothead.   But Slim is very protective of his friend and Charlie eventually proves to Wil that he can do as good a job as any of the other kids.   When Charlie gets thrown in the midst of a stampeding heard of horses, Slim races out to rescue him, almost getting himself killed in the process when his own cinch breaks just as he snatches his friend from the path of the thundering herd.   Wil chews them both out for the mistakes they made that nearly got them both killed…

Then he turned to Slim and shouted as if the boy were a mile away: “And you Mr. Galahad, just you listen to me!   You better get down on your knees and pray God that cinch of yours really broke.   Because if I find it’s in one piece and only came loose I’m running your tail out of here today.   If you don’t know how to saddle a horse proper, you don’t belong on the Double-O!”

Mr. Galahad… It seems they are inseparable.   But Charlie is suddenly taken with Cimarron, a beautiful young Mexican drifter who wanders onto Wil’s ranch looking for work.   When Charlie decides to be Cimarron’s bunkie during the cattle drive, Slim gets a tad jealous…

Slim was eating alone off to one side.     Charlie Schwartz brought his plate over and sat down beside him.

“What’s the matter Slim?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“Well, shouldn’t I be kind of took back at the way you threw in with the bean-eater?   When your soogan burned in the barn I just naturally thought you’d be my bunkie.”

“He asked.”

“Did I have to ask?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“You gonna keep with him?”

“I guess.”

Well I never thought you’d choose a stranger over me.   And for sure not a bean-eater.”

“Call him Cimarron.”

“That’s not his name.”

“That’s his summer name.   It means somebody who ran away.”

“And that ain’t all.   It’s a name for somebody wild and lawless and won’t join in.   It must have been gave to him.   It’s too good for him to take himself.”

“He’s not really like that Slim.”

“And I’ll tell you something else, Charlie Schwartz.   I happen to know he has a desperado flag in his war bag.”

“A what?”

“One of them red sashes the old cowboys wore when they wanted to show off and raise hell.”

“Slim, I’ll thank you not to talk him down.   He’s my friend.”

“All right.”

Later on the drive, Wil takes note of which boys have partnered with which…

Early in the drive they began to split the blankets.   After a hard rain, they found that if they doubled up they could sleep on a tarp as well as under one.   Unexpected pairs tried each other out and became bunkies.   Only Slim and Weedy slept alone.   Nobody would have Weedy, and Slim would have nobody.

It almost goes right over your head because, well, that sort of thing just Never Happened in the old west.   Jennings doesn’t come right out and say what’s going on between Slim, Charlie and Cimarron, but as you read this next passage from the book, one that didn’t make it into the film, note that in Jenning’s glossary of cowboy terms at the back of the book, “bunkie” for “bedmate” is related to “bunky”, which is a horse that pitches…

Wil began to fret when Cimarron didn’t show up. It just about had to mean the beautiful little bastard had got himself into some sort of trouble down to the south. The Old Woman said, “No, maybe he just got himself loose in the foots and free in the fancy. Cimarron ain’t no fireside boy, you know. He don’t belong to nothing and nobody except himself. Could be he just cut his pocket pin and drifted.”

Everybody was looking at him. Wil felt tired and mean. He turned to young Charlie Schwartz and asked, “You’re his bunkie. You think that’s what he did?”

Young Charlie looked at the ground in what would have been blushing confusion if he hadn’t been so tanned. Then he looked up and set Wil Andersen back on his heels. “It takes more then sleeping with a man to know what’s on his mind.”

Wil looked at the ground. The Old Woman was smiling, but it was a good point. Wil almost liked the boy for a moment, because you could see he was worried about Cimarron too.

It’s easy, given how much of our past has been deliberately erased, for people to point and say that Jennings was a militant homosexual activist imposing homosexuality on a time and people in our nation’s history where there was no such thing.   But among other things Jennings relates in the glossary of cowboy terms,   a “gimlet” is a tool for boring holes, but   Gimlet-ended” to the cowboy meant a man with a small butt and to “gimlet” your horse was to ride it so hard it got a sore back.   As Jennings writes, something is clearly being alluded to there in cowboy slang.

Slang is worth paying attention to because it’s where words become art that everyday people use to describe their lives and their world.   The world of the cowboys was a real place with real people in it.   Some of whom, were same-sex couples.

An’ This I’ll say, when all is o’er,
An’ Jeff has crossed to t’other shore,
I only hope that you and me
May stand as good a chance as he.

Someday, we’ll have our history back.   All of it.   And…our poetry.

You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities.  If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex. 

I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story.  Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country.  Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.

I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era.  Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it.  And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.

Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power. 

They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department.  But it was a game of tag.  In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks".  Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.

Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details.  How many of those were communists?  It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously.  What they wanted was to get it out in the open.  And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty.  The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors.  Just…you know…security risks.  Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.

That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers.  Not a communist threat, but a lavender one.  Why?  Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did.  In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats.  And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.

McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise.  He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist?  But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.

Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way.  But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats.  Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism.  And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.

You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation?  Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…?  This is why.  Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop.  This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.

The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new.  Not at all.  What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media.  And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.

Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting.  But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.

[Edited a tad…]

Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…

…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.

Read the whole thing on SLOG…

The day after the homos rioted in Greenwich Village, the New York newspapers barely mentioned it.  But that was par for the course back in the 60s.  I was a fifteen year old kid when it happened, growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., and didn’t hear about the riots until I was well into my own coming out to myself process in 1971.  By then, the scruffy, angry, younger gay liberation front was rudely elbowing aside an older generation of more genteel suit and tie activists, who had tried with painfully little to show for it, to work within the system for change. 

You’d have thought the gay civil rights movement had begun on the street in front of the Stonewall Inn.  It didn’t.   In the lightning flash of the Stonewall riots we lost sight for a while of how much courage it would have taken to picket for gay rights in front of the White House, as activist Frank Kameny and members of the Mattachine Society of Washington did on April 17, 1965.  Kameny was rightfully honored recently at a White House ceremony, and received an official apology for being fired in 1957 from his position as an astronomer for the Army map service.  People think the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s were all about ferreting out communists in government and industy.  But homosexuals were just as much, if not more of a target then.  We need to remember the staggering courage it took for those early pioneers in the struggle to come forward, and push back against the hate.  But we also need to remember this…

A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.

I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.

Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression…

And thus the phrase "militant homosexuals" entered the vernacular.  But all it takes to become a Militant Homosexual is to simply believe there is nothing wrong with you and behave accordingly.  There is nothing unusual about people getting angry when they are mistreated.  There is nothing remarkable about people fighting back when their basic human rights are denied them.  There is nothing less surprising then to witness lovers protecting and defending the sacred ground between them.  Especially young lovers.  When someone utters the phrase "militant homosexuals", what you should be hearing is: I Can’t See The People For The Homosexuals.

The older generation had grown up in a time when homosexuality was almost universally regarded as a dirty secret, a filthy perversion, the less spoken of the better.  As new studies began to show that we were a natural part of the human family after all, that generation began, very courageously, to take that message to the public.  See…we’re just like you after all…  And so we are, the ordinary among us and the exotic both.  But you can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into. 

As long as the rest of society could look the other way while our lives were drowned in a sea of prejudice and hate, we would never make any progress.  As long as the rest of society could ignore the toll prejudice was taking on our lives, that prejudice would keep doing its work on us.  That night in June of 1969, the frustration of the young and outcast simply boiled over.  And the rest of us saw something we had never seen before: gay people, angry gay people, fighting back.  And it lit a fire in us.  And we would never be the same.  Because a few street kids and drag queens simply had enough, that one night, that one time.

There are times when it’s wise to listen to what the older generation has to say.  We’ve been there…we took the hits…we saw it all with our own eyes.  But never…Never…let someone old enough to have achieved some measure of success, and made a good and comfortable life for themselves, tell You what you have to put up with. 

[Edited…much…]

While reading the extract below, keep in mind that the author is talking about a time in this country, the 1950s, when every state in the union outlawed same sex relations among consenting adults.  No prostitution or public sexual conduct was necessary to be convicted of "the crime against nature".  Gay men and women, caught up in police witch hunts, often had to denounce others.  And in addition to being locked up in jail, people’s names, and sometimes photographs were published, and homes and jobs would be lost…

Across the country there was an alarming vagueness in legal definitions as to who might be classified as a sexual psychopath.  State laws defined a sexual psychopath as someone who had a "propensity" to commit sex offenses (Michigan and Missouri) or who "lacked the power to control his sexual impulses" (Massachusetts and Nebraska).  In most states, however, authorities couldn’t just pluck such a person off the street and label him a sexual psychopath.  In Alabama, for instance, the suspect had to be convicted of a sex crime first.  Under the proposed Iowa legislation, such a person had to be charged with – but not necessarily convicted of – a "public offense."  In Nebraska, on the other hand, a suspect didn’t have to be charged; all that was needed were certain facts showing "good cause" and the process of classification as a sexual psychopath could begin.  And in Minnesota, the only requirements were a petition by a county attorney and an examination by "two duly licensed doctors of medicine."

Whatever their individual wordings, such laws were intended to bring about the indefinite of dangerous or socially undesirable people.  In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists rule that he was "cured" or at the very least no longer posed a threat to society.

Despite their good intentions, sexual psychopath laws invariably took a catch-all approach to sexual offenses.  The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between violent and non-violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless "sexual deviates" and dangerous sex criminals.  An adult homosexual man who had sex with his lover in the privacy of his bedroom was as deviant as a child murderer.  A person who had a pornographic book or photograph hidden in a night table faced the same punishment as a rapist.  All these people were lumped into one category – that of the sexual psychopath – and could be incarcerated in a state hospital indefinitely.

New York lawyer and judge Morris Ploscowe, one of the most prominent critics of sexual psychopath laws at the time, found that these were most often used to punish and isolate minor offenders rather then dangerous predators.  In Minnesota, which enacted its sexual psychopath law in the ’30s, some 200 people were committed to state hospitals in the first ten years of the law’s existence, according to Ploscowe.  Most were detained for homosexual activity, not for being hard-core sex criminals.

–Neal Miller: Sex-Crime Panic

This may be difficult for some of my heterosexual readers to grasp here…but back in those days, mere possession of pornography was enough to get you lumped in with rapists, murderers…and homosexuals.  What may be difficult for some of my younger gay readers to grasp, is that a heterosexual charged with possession of pornography back then would likely be more appalled to to find themselves being compared to homosexuals then to rapists and murderers.  The stigma of being homosexual really was that profound.  You were more despicable then even rapists and murderers.  More despicable even, then a communist.

When the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the sodomy laws in 2003, fourteen states still had some form of sodomy law on the books…four of them applying only to conduct between members of the same sex.  In Idaho and Michigan you could get life for it.  That was only six years ago.

If you’re curious, Miller’s book, Sex Crime Panic is a good place to begin developing an understanding of what Stonewall means to your gay and lesbian neighbors.  Miller details events that took place in Iowa in 1955, following the rape and murder of two children.  To address a growing public anti-gay hysteria, authorities arrested 20 gay men who they never even claimed had anything to do with the murders, had them declared "sexual psychopaths" and locked them up in a state mental hospital indefinitely.  The only thing unique about Miller’s story, is that someone actually went to the trouble to document it all, finally.

I hadn’t known this, but the other day on Fark.Com one of the headlines read that January is National Drag History Month.  As a gay man who tends to favor somewhat androgynous males, I have to admit that some of these performers just knock me out.  That’s not to say I like it when guys dress up as girls, so much as when guys can be sexy and sultry and beautiful.  There’s an art to this that I never really appreciated when I was younger, and stereotyped drag as an artifact of gay repression.  You can certainly view it that way.  But in a more liberated time, you can also view it as a kind of subversive gender-bending art that is beautiful and sexy for its own sake.

Some drag performers don’t have it.  They just look like guys wearing dresses.  But some guys have got it going on.  One commenter on Fark said that a boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress. 

No…  Not at all…

…not at all.   

So…  Happy National Drag History Month Mrs Cuba…aka Deanna Lexington.  Wish my friends down there hadn’t been such a bunch of jackass knuckle-dragging dickheads and let me have a chance to meet you last year.  But if you happen to chance across this post…I have some more photos from that Academy of Washington D.C. Miss Gaye Universe Ball.  It was nice to see you get an award.  Personally, I thought you should have taken it all.

43 years ago today, this is what the nation was being told about its gay citizens, by one of the big national news magazines…

It used to be "the abominable crime not to be mentioned." Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him.

A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy. Society is torn between condemnation and compassion, fear and curiosity, between attempts to turn the problem into a joke and the knowledge that it is anything but funny, between the deviate’s plea to be treated just like everybody else and the knowledge that he simply is not like everybody else.

…In 1948, Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published figures that homosexuals found cheering. He estimated that 4% of American white males are exclusively homosexual and that about two in five had "at least some" homosexual experience after puberty. Given Kinsey’s naive sampling methods, the figures were almost certainly wrong. But chances are that growing permissiveness about homosexuality and a hedonistic attitude toward all sex have helped "convert" many people who might have repressed their inclinations in another time or place.

Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband’s homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts. Women and homosexual men work together designing, marketing, retailing, and wrapping it all up in the fashion magazines. The interior decorator and the stockbroker’s wife conspire over curtains. And the symbiosis is not limited to working hours. For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort —witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm’s length. Rich dowagers often have a permanent traveling court of charming international types who exert influence over what pictures and houses their patronesses buy, what decorators they use, and where they spend which season.

…

There is no denying the considerable talent of a great many homosexuals, and ideally, talent alone is what should count. But the great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity—the Leonardos and Michelangelos —are probably the exceptions of genius. For the most part, thinks Los Angeles Psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook, homosexuals are failed artists, and their special creative gift a myth. No less an authority than Somerset Maugham felt that the homosexual, "however subtly he sees life, cannot see it whole," and lacks "the deep seriousness over certain things that normal men take seriously … He has small power of invention, but a wonderful gift for delightful embroidery.
 
Homosexual ethics and esthetics are staging a vengeful, derisive counterattack on what deviates call the "straight" world. This is evident in "pop," which insists on reducing art to the trivial, and in the "camp" movement, which pretends that the ugly and banal are fun. It is evident among writers, who used to disguise homosexual stories in heterosexual dress but now delight in explicit descriptions of male intercourse and orgiastic nightmares. It is evident in the theater, with many a play dedicated to the degradation of women and the derision of normal sex. The most sophisticated theatrical joke is now built around a homosexual situation; shock comes not from sex but from perversion. Attacks on women or society in general are neither new in U.S. writing nor necessarily homosexual, but they do offer a special opportunity for a consciously or unconsciously homosexual outlook.
 
They represent a kind of inverted romance, since homosexual situations as such can never be made romantic for normal audiences.  

…

Even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the "things that normal men take seriously." This does not mean that homosexuals do not and cannot talk seriously; but there is often a subtle sea change in the conversation: sex (unspoken) pervades the atmosphere. Among other matters, this raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a discernible homosexual type. Some authorities, notably Research Psychologist Evelyn Hooker of U.C.L.A., deny it—against what seems to be the opinion of most psychiatrists. The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."

Another homosexual trait noted by Bergler and others is chronic dissatisfaction, a constant tendency to prowl or "cruise" in search of new partners. This is one reason why the "gay" bars flourishing all over the U.S. attract even the more respectable deviates.

…

The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.

Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she."

Is homosexuality curable? Freud thought not. In the main, he felt that analysis could only bring the deviant patient relief from his neurotic conflicts by giving him "harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed." Many of Freud’s successors are more optimistic. Philadelphia’s Dr. Samuel Hadden reported last year that he had achieved twelve conversions out of 32 male homosexuals in group therapy. Paris Psychiatrist Sacha Nacht reports that about a third of his patients turn heterosexual, a third adjust to what they are, and a third get no help at all. But he feels that only about one in ten is moved to seek help in the first place.

That is the crux: most homosexuals apparently do not desire a cure…

Focus on the Family? The Mormon Times? No…Time Magazine, issue of January 21, 1966 – The Homosexual In America

You can read the whole thing Here.

I was 12 years old. By the end of the year I would turn 13, and enter my teen years in an America where the common view of gay people were that we were sick tortured twisted sexual deviants who ought to be locked up for the safety of the community. When I was 14 I would sit with my grade school peers in a sex ed class, taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with, and preferred to kidnap and rape children and seduce young heterosexuals, rather then seek out other homosexuals for sexual trysts, precisely because we knew how dangerous we were. They taught us that homosexuals would become so excited during sex that we often mutilated the genitals of the people we were having sex with. They taught us that we were confused about which gender we were, and hated ourselves, and would take out that hate on other people by killing them horribly. Most unsolved murders we were told, were committed by homosexuals. That was the world I came to know myself in.

How I managed to come out of my teen years into adulthood not completely loathing myself as others of my generation did is a story I’m (very slowly I’m afraid…) telling in cartoon form in A Coming Out Story. I was so lucky…especially in that my first high school crush was so completely decent to me. Those of us who made it out of there in one piece emotionally and mentally, pretty much swore to make sure other gay kids didn’t have to go through what we did, and to fight for the honor and the dignity of our lives, and our loves, so that future generations wouldn’t have to know what it was like to have your teachers look you in the face and try to make you and all your friends believe that you were a sexual monster…a deviant…a pervert…

You knew it was going to be an easy day in class when you walked in and saw one of the school’s Bell & Howell Filmosound 16mm projectors set up in the middle of the room. If the teacher was a technologically challenged sort, they’d let the class AV geek (sometimes that was me) thread the film through it and run it. You got to sit back and watch a film, and it was a safe bet that the film would be a lot more interesting and engaging then whatever teacher taught that particular class. Or to put it another way, you knew you had a good teacher when the sight of the film projector was a bit of a let-down.

My favorites were the Bell Labs educational films. Least appreciated on my list were the Highway Safety Institute films that grossed and scared the crap out of me to the point where I almost refused to get a driver’s license. Oh…and the sex ed films about the dangers of heavy petting. Who cared about that stuff anyway?

Then there were the films warning us about the dangers of homosexuality. I think I saw this one in high school…

Yeah, I laughed. As someone who actually sat through some of those old 1950s morality films, I can tell you that whoever did that one got it just about perfect…down to the stilted dialogue and cheesy narration. All that was missing from it was the randomly warbly sound of the old 16mm projector audio.

But some of us still remember the real thing…

That’s what me and my peers all got back in grade school. They were showing this crap to us as early as 8th grade. Before the personal computer came along, before the internet, before cable TV and home video, the only things we knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, were what we were taught in films like that one.

I’m sure those 1950s film makers had no idea, no clue themselves, that some of the kids watching that film were gay themselves, or that the others in the class would one day learn that an old classmate they’d gone to school alongside of is gay, and have to reconcile the kid they’d known with the image of the sick and twisted homosexual monster that they were taught. I’m sure those 1950s film makers had no idea, no clue themselves, what it was like to be either one of those kids, all grown up now, looking apprehensively at each other.

Since last Monday I’ve finished half a page on Episode 11 of A Coming Out Story.  It’s slow work when all I have is the weekday evenings.  Tonight I was only able to finish one panel, but that got a page done and I can see the end of the pencil work on this one in front of me.

A few panels are some of my best pencil work so far.  There’s a close-up of a young me with my head on the pillow at the beginning of this one that I’m especially happy with.  And one pencil of the object of my affections that gets him pretty well right, as I remember him strolling through the hallways of my old high school.  I’m getting good now at drawing my main actors with a few simple lines.  We’ll see how well they translate into inks.

I’m able to have fun again with the whole situation I’m relating in my story.  I think now, that part of my cartoonist’s block this past year has been that it wasn’t fun revisiting it, because I was living it all over after again having found him again after 35 years of searching.  That shy seventeen year old is still there inside of me, and I’ve been walking on eggshells for over a year now, stressing all over again about what he thinks or doesn’t think of me.  It’s crazy…I’m a grown man now…but there it is.  So trying to get my sense of humor back about that part of my life so I could work on the story just hasn’t been do-able.  I’ve been stressing almost exactly like I was 35 years ago.  Maybe some day when I’ve finished A Coming Out Story, I’ll do one about how finding your first crush turns you back into the kid you were all over again, and all the things in your past you thought you’d settled and resolved you only thought you had.

The other thing that may have got me motivated again is a couple books I’m reading written by gay men who were imprisoned in Britian back in the 1950s for "homosexual offenses" or "gross indecency".  I’m into a book my Peter Wildeblood, Against The Law, in which he gives an account of his being caught up in the Montagu scandal of 1954 and his subsiquent imprisonment.  Part of what I want to relate in my own story is how it was I managed to navagate my way to self acceptance without hating myself, and how easily it could have gone the other way for me.  I was lucky in so many ways, but mostly in that.  Because I fell in love, and because the guy I fell in love with was a decent, good-hearted guy who was good to me, I never hated myself. 

But that was purely accidental.  I came of age just after Stonewall, and just before the APA removed homosexuality from it’s list of mental illnesses, and the popular culture all around me constantly told me I was some sort of disgusting, degenerate monster.  It was seeing my sexual orientation in the context of being in love, that saved me from that.  It was pure luck.  And I was fortunate also, very fortunate, to be coming of age right when the modern gay rights movement was taking off, just after Stonewall.  Ten years earlier, and I might have been locked up like Wildeblood was.  Or sent off to a mental hospital.  That would probably have killed me.  It killed a lot of people. 

And the hate is still killing people.  When I was a gay teenager, gay kids got absolutely no adult guidance while making that difficult transition from child to adult.  The only thing we were taught then was that it was tragic, if not utterly disgusting, that we existed.  It is barely any better nowadays.  The religious right is fighting a furious, bitter, scorched earth battle to keep gay kids from accepting themselves and growing up to live healthy and whole adult lives.  We have to hate ourselves, as much as they hate us.  One thing I want to try to do with my story is get across the message that gay kids need to be loved, like all children do.  They don’t need to be taught to hate themselves.  It is a crime against humanity, to teach a child to hate themselves.  Reading Wildeblood’s story reminded me of that other reason why I wanted to get my own story down, in my own way.

Swear to God every time I turn around these days I find myself discovering something just…amazing…in the story of Gay people.  The Telegraph sensationalizes this guy as the "inspiration" for Lucas and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones.  I strongly doubt it…but his story is interesting all the same…

The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the temple of doom

Very little is certain in the short life of Otto Rahn. But one of the few things one can with any confidence say about him is that he looked nothing like Harrison Ford. Yet Rahn, small and weasel-faced, with a hesitant, toothy smile and hair like a neatly contoured oil slick, undoubtedly served as inspiration for Ford’s most famous role, Indiana Jones.

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail – the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.

However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that – if it ever existed – had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.

Well he didn’t find it, obviously, or there wouldn’t still be documentaries being made today about the search for the Holy Grail.  What he did find, like a lot of Germans did to their horror back then, was when you give someone who promises to make heads roll absolute power, don’t be surprised when one of those heads is yours.

According to Jeremy Morgan, whose uncle, Herman Kirchmeir, was a friend of Rahn’s, the two men shared an interest in Parsifal and the Grail. ‘They used to go climbing together, exploring caves and so forth. I used to hear about him as a child. The feeling in my family was that Rahn was an honourable man who had got himself into this terrible bind. He wasn’t anti-Semitic, but he’d taken the SS’s money because he needed funding for his archaeological projects. Then, having done so, he couldn’t get out.’

What gives Rahn’s dilemma peculiar piquancy is that there’s evidence to suggest that he was Jewish himself – although it’s not clear if he was aware of it. He was also gay. Bravely, if naively, Rahn began to move in anti-Nazi circles. Nigel Graddon, author of a new biography of Rahn, Otto Rahn and the Quest for the Holy Grail: the Amazing Life of the Real Indiana Jones, believes that Himmler’s disenchantment with Rahn was a result of his failure to find the Grail.

‘Basically, he came back empty-handed,’ he says. ‘That was his biggest offence. It’s true that Rahn did voice anti-Nazi sentiments, but he was always pretty discreet about it. What would have been far more of a problem to Himmler was that Rahn was openly homosexual. In the early days, Himmler had been prepared to turn a blind eye to it. But as time went on, his tolerance wore thin.’

In 1937, Rahn was punished for a drunken homosexual scrape by being assigned to a three-month tour of duty as a guard at Dachau concentration camp. What he saw there appalled him. Clearly in a state of anguish he wrote to a friend, ‘I have much sorrow in my country… impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in a nation that my native country has become.’

He also wrote to Himmler resigning from the SS. This, too, was as naive as it was brave – the SS being the sort of organisation you only resigned from feet-first. Although Himmler accepted Rahn’s resignation, he had no intention of letting him escape. What happened next is unclear. There are stories that Rahn was threatened with having his homosexuality exposed, also that he had links with British Intelligence.

Told that SS hitmen were out to get him, Rahn was apparently offered the option of committing suicide. One evening in March 1939, he climbed up a snow-covered slope in the Tyrol mountains and lay down to die. He is believed to have swallowed poison, although no cause of death was ever given. The following day Rahn’s body was found, frozen solid. He was 34.

‘I always understood that he had chosen his favourite spot to die in,’ says Morgan. ‘He was lying down looking up at the mountains, rather as if this might lead his soul to some Arthurian heaven.’

You know…this guy was a romantic in the worst sort of way, not the best.  The quest for the Holy Grail is one of those things only eccentric boobs go on, like the Fountain Of Youth or the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.  He was smart, he was persistent, he could have lent his passion to serious archeology and added a few lines to the book of knowledge in the process.  Instead he let himself wander off into an enchantment.  But you really have to admire someone who had the nerve to write Heinrich Himmler a letter of resignation.  That wasn’t naivety, it was that guilelessness which in the fire separates the human from the thug.  The oppressor finds its tool isn’t so pliant after all.  Humans have a conscience.  They also dream…

And there the story might have ended – except that Hollywood has conferred a strange kind of immortality on Otto Rahn. But it’s not only Hollywood; on the internet, his memory continues to be bathed in a richly speculative glow, fanned by ever more outlandish theories about his fate.

Predictably, there are stories that Rahn was murdered, or that he didn’t die at all in the Tyrol – this was just a clever bluff to fool the Nazis. Instead, he apparently survived, changed his first name to Rudolf and went on to become the German ambassador in Italy. Graddon believes that, ‘There is too much fog swirling around his headstone. We simply don’t know what happened to him, and as a result all kinds of rumours have sprung up.’

As for the Grail, that too lives on, with claimants and contenders continuing to turn up in the most unlikely places. The most recent sighting was in 2004 when it was supposed to have been found in the late Lord Lichfield’s back-garden in Staffordshire. As the estate manager said at the time, ‘The Grail is like Everest: you climb it because it’s there.’ Or not there, of course.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude… 

Morgan has posted to YouTube the rough cut he currently has of the opening sequence to This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. It looks to be a fantastic documentary when he gets it all put together. And for the first time, people will get a chance to hear Zach speak for himself about what happened to him.

In this clip via the historical footage Morgan managed to dig up, you get a taste of what it was like before the gay rights movement came of age. The captioning Morgan adds to it captures the sense of the times perfectly…

Once upon a time…
There were some monsters…
Everybody was scared of them…

I was a gay teen back in those days, although I spent most of it in a comfortable cocoon of ignorance. But that’s exactly how it was. Homosexuals were monsters. And then one day I realized I was one of the monsters they were talking about. Watching those clips Morgan found brought that whole period of time back to me. And for the haters, it’s still true to this day. We are monsters, not human beings. That is why the Ex-Gay ministries appeared. Not to save our souls, but to impress upon us that we are monsters.

There’s only a small portion of the interview Zach gave Morgan here. And I think I can say now that this is out, that I was privileged to be there to witness and photograph it (I agreed that Morgan would have the copyright to the photos). There is so much I haven’t been able to say these years, biting my tongue while others waved Zach’s first blog post after leaving Love In Action as proof that he had taken LIA’s side of things and ultimately agreed with what had been done to him. And Zach, let it be said, isn’t interested now, and wasn’t really then, in being the center of a media storm. The poor kid just wanted to live his life. When he cried out for help, it was to his friends. That it quickly spread all over the Internet and became an international media storm was as much a surprise to him as to anyone. But he’s smart, he’s got a good heart, and he’s perfectly capable of speaking for himself when he wants to. I think that comes through pretty clearly in the few moments you see of him in this clip.

There will be more of the interview with Zach, and much more of the events surrounding the Love In Action protests, when Morgan finally finishes his edits and premieres the documentary. I have no ETA and I don’t think Morgan does either…he’s working hard on getting it right, because its so important. It’ll be done when it’s done.

And before you ask…yes, I am listed as an Executive Producer on this documentary. But seriously…all a producer does is produce money. The film is 100 percent Morgan’s, and I cannot speak for or about anyone involved in the production or anyone interviewed in it beyond what you can already see here. Morgan and crew can all speak for themselves, and probably will if you ask them. Morgan can be reached Here, at the Sawed-Off Film’s web site. You can see a collection of Sawed-Off YouTube clips Here.

Some random thoughts on homosexuals and homosexuality from back when I was a struggling gay teen…

I think homosexuals cursed, and I am afraid I mean this quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck whose origin is so unclear as to be, finally, a mystery.

If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure who are forced to live it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it.

They are different from the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences — religious, class, racial — in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality.

… 

I do think homosexuality an anathema, and hence homosexuals cursed, and thus the importance, for me if for no one else, of my defining a homosexual as someone who has physical relations, for it leaves room for my admiration for the man who is pulled toward homosexuality and resists, at what psychic price I cannot hope even to begin to imagine.

… 

I was stunned, then angry.   I was angry, first, at my own lack of judgment and subtlety in not deducing that Richard was a homosexual; and, second, more intensely, at being victimized by his duplicity.   We were not close friends, but I liked him, and not it seemed that every moment we had spent together was a huge sham, an elaborate piece of deception to hide the essential, the number one, fact in his life.

… 

I have four sons, and while I do not walk the streets thinking constantly about their sexual development, worrying right on through the night about their turning out homosexual, I have very little idea, apart from supplying them with ample security and affection, about how to prevent it.   Uptight?   You’re damn right.   Given any choice in the matter, I should prefer sons who are heterosexual.   My ignorance makes me frightened.

-Joseph Epstein, "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity," Harper’s, September 1970

…and then, from back when I was a struggling gay young adult…

In the case of the husbands at Fire Island Pines, the homosexuals were right about one thing.  Their uneasiness did contain a large component of fear. The fear of straight men in the face of the homosexual community, however, is not that they will be tempted to join in but that they are being diminished by it, diminished in their persons and diminished in their lives.  As women in a full company of homosexual men feel devalued and sexually rejected – that is the very reason certain women, they used to be called "fag hags", choose to spend their lives in such company – heterosexual men feel themselves mocked.  They feel mocked in their unending thralldom to the female body and thus their unending dependence on those who possess it.  They feel mocked by the longing for and vulnerability to and even humiliation from women they have since boyhood permitted themselves to endure, while others apparently just like themselves, slowly assert their escape from these things

They feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as substance, fmaily men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose.  In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment. 

In Fire Island Pines they were in fact being mocked explicitly, not so much by individual homosexuals as the reigning homosexual fashion.  The essence of that fashion was the worship of youth – youth not even understood as young manhood but rather boyhood (and indeed, the straight women among themselves always referred to the homosexuals as "the boys").  On the beach particularly, this worship became all powerful and inescapable to the eye.  It was a constant source of wonder among us, and remains so to me to this day, that by far the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs, were smooth and silky, an impression strengthened by the fact that they were in addition frequently and scrupulously unguented to catch the full advantage of the sun’s ultra violet. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual “preference” and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones, or was there some constant special process of depilation? But smooth-skinned they were, and, like the most narcissistic of pretty young girls and women, made an absolute fetish of the dark and uniform suntan, devoting hours, days, weeks, to turning themselves carefully to the sun. Nor was this tanning flesh ever permitted to betray any of the ordinary signs of encroaching mortality, such as excess fat or flabbiness or on the other hand the kind of muscularity that suggests some activity whose end is not beauty. In short, year by year homosexuals of all ages presented a never-ending spectacle, zealously and ruthlessly monitored, of tender adolescence.

… 

One thing is certain. To become homosexual is a weighty act. Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different “lifestyle”). Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options. In accepting the movement’s terms, heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexual’s flight from normality. Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine that they have done anyone a kindness?

-Midge Decter, "The Boys On The Beach," Commentary, September 1980

Read a good take down on Epstein over at David Ehrenstein’s site…Here.  Ehrenstein was one of the gay activists who stormed the offices of Harper’s Magazine after Harper’s doggedly refused to air any rebuttals to Epstein’s public wish to see homosexuals removed from the face of the earth.

Decter’s theses, if you will, in The Boys On The Beach, is that only a conservative and officially anti-gay culture keeps the innately self destructive impulses of gay men in check, whereas liberalism allows those impulses to become fully realized.  Thus, according to Decter, persecuting homosexuals is actually a kindness.  Anti-gay persecution is necessary in order to save homosexuals from themselves.  This is the position that the American movement conservatives have taken ever since, and Decter’s 1980 essay in Commentary is still regarded warmly in winger circles, as an important work.  You see echos of The Boys On The Beach in every opinion piece on homosexuals and homosexuality from the movement conservatives, even now.  The premise, often unspoken but there between the lines, that culture and the law must be stacked against gay people, for their own good of course, because of the innately self destructive nature of homosexuality, is so ingrained in their rhetoric now that it’s central premise is taken as a given.  It is homosexuality, not the persecution of homosexuals, that is destructive.  Therefore, the solution is, surprise, surprise, More persecution. 

But the Epstein essay gets to the heart of it: Homosexuals are cursed…they are anathema…they are different from us…they frighten us…if we could, we’d remove them from the face of the earth…because we are incapable of coming to terms with them.  Yes we’re cursed alright.  Not by our nature, but by their hate.  Their calm, cool, thoroughly intellectual hate.  There is the bedrock of The Boys On The Beach.  There is the stinking rotten core of the secular right’s view of gay people.  See how it is not all that different from that of the fundamentalists.  Just add God, and you have a James Dobson speaking there.  Anyone who thinks there is enough difference between the religious right and the secular right when it comes to gay people, that at least the secularists can be talked to, is just not paying attention.

My Friend Jon Larimore, who himself was once the sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS System, informed me the other day that the Internet filters at Panera Bread are still calling this web site pornographic.  I admit to feeling a small twinge of pride when Jon and I were sitting down to eat at Panera some months ago, and I first saw that message blocking access to my web site, with the notice that it had been deemed pornographic.  I was also given a helpful address where I could appeal their decision if I felt that it was unwarranted.  Of course I have no intention of doing that because I know damn well what the problem is.  It isn’t that there’s actually anything pornographic anywhere here.  At most this site might occasionally get an ‘R’ rating…but most of the time it would only merit a ‘PG’ and that for my tendency to curse a lot when I get angry. 

Oh no…the problem is that I am a gay man, writing about my life openly and honestly and I don’t give a flying fuck if any of that bothers the bigots.  Remember this: A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.  A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual acting like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.  You don’t have to march in any Pride Day parade.  You don’t have to walk a protest line.  You don’t have to wave your rainbow flag.  All you need to be labeled a Militant Homosexual is believe you have the same right to exist as anyone else.  Then you are a militant.  And if you push back when you are pushed around by bigotry, then you are a militant activist.

I’m especially proud that this little notice from Jon that I’m still being blocked just coincidentally happened to come near the anniversary of a major milestone in gay history…the day we won the right to send and receive publications written by and for gay folks through the mail.

Jim Burroway gives us a first rate retelling of that moment back in 1958:

ONE, Inc. was founded by several members of the Los Angeles Mattachine Society who felt that a strong nationwide voice for education and advocacy was desperately needed. According to ONE, Inc.’s articles of incorporation, “…the specific and primary purposes … are to publish and disseminate a magazine dealing primarily with homosexuality from the scientific, historical and critical point of view, and to aid in the social integration and rehabilitation of the sexual variant.” But this wasn’t going to be just any magazine. Under the inaugural editorial leadership of Martin Block, Dale Jennings, Don Slater and Donald Webster Cory, ONE magazine was to be a first class product, a dramatic departure from the typewritten and mimeographed sheets which were more common at the time.

This Internet you are reading now, with the vast freedom of information and personal knowledge it makes possible, is an amazing, glorious thing to some of us who remember what the world was like once upon a time, when the censors could decide for us what we could and could not read…what we could and could not know…

ONE filled a very critical role for gays and lesbians during a very dark time. ONE’s debut coincided with a major push to rid the U.S. civil service of homosexuals. President Dwight D. Eisenhower would sign Executive Order 10450 in April of that year, which barred gays and lesbians from federal employment with its “sexual perversion” clause. This followed a highly-publicized purge of more than 400 gays and lesbians from the civil service some three years earlier. Homosexuality was criminalized in most states, and it was stigmatized as a mental illness by the psychiatric profession. Gays were not only denounced as security risks, but risks to the very moral fiber of the nation. Homosexuals were treated as subversives, on par with the “Communist menace” on which leading politicians were staking their career. The FBI had launched a major crackdown on homosexuality across the U.S., with many gays and lesbians losing their jobs for merely receiving homophile publications in the mail. And vice squads everywhere were setting up entrapment stings in bars and other meeting places, where a simple proposition or touch could lead to arrest and public exposure.

So when ONE caught the eye of the FBI, they immediately launched an investigation to try to shut it down. They went so far as to write to the employers of ONE’s editors and writers (they all depended on their day jobs for income), saying that their employees were “deviants” and “security risks.” Fortunately, no one lost their jobs, the FBI decided it wasn’t worth their time, and ONE continued publishing.

The job of shutting down ONE then fell to the U.S. Post Office. Since its inception, Los Angeles postal authorities vetted each issue before deciding whether it was legal to ship under the Post Office’s stringent anti-obscenity standards. And since homosexuality was illegal in most states, ONE had the added problem of possibly being guilty of promoting criminal activity…

In those days, the only voices allowed to publicly speak about homosexuals and homosexuality, were the voices of those who hated us.  If we ourselves spoke up, if we published our stories in any form, we risked arrest, exposure, the loss of our jobs, our homes, and jail.  This is how censorship and the sodomy laws together maintained the status-quo, by silencing dissent.  And back then homosexuals were so universally despised that even the ACLU would not take this case…in fact, it defended the existence of the sodomy laws. 

Two things changed all that, and made possible the world we now live in today: a scrappy little gay publication named One, and the supreme court of Chief Justice Earl Warren.  The Warren court is almost universally hated today by the American right.  From its striking down of the laws allowing race segregation to its striking down of the laws restricting the rights of Americans to freedom of speech and freedom of the press…even extending those rights to a hated minority, there is almost nothing the Warren court did, that the republicans have not vowed to overturn, should they get their chance to stack the court with like-minded right wingers. 

So far Bush has given them two more justices.  They only need one more. 

[Edited a tad…]

Before the Internet opened up to commercial use, before home computers had powerful multi-tasking operating systems, back when 640k of system ram was considered more then most people would ever need or use, little computer bulletin board systems (BBS) ruled.  In the mid 1980s, some of them had banded together into an amateur network called FidoNet.

In the mid-1980s, I was on one local BBS system that had a gay Fidonet echomail board.  Called Gaylink, it had participating BBS systems on it all over the world.  Back in those days, I had an uncle who was a HAM radio operator, and was trying to interest me in taking up the hobby.  He kept trying to tell me about all the people all over the world he was able to communicate with via shortwave radio, and I kept trying to tell him about all the people all over the world I was communicating with via FidoNet.

Gaylink was mostly a social forum.  We chatted about this and that…a little politics, a little dishing.  It never really got very serious.  Then one day a message from a BSS in the Netherlands appeared. It was short and to the point: 

I’m 14 years old.  I think I might be gay but I’m not sure.  How did you know about yourself?  What was it like?

And from literally all over the world this kid got coming-out-to-self stories.  Some of them were painful to read.  Some were hopeful.  Some were amazingly nonchalant.  There were folks whose parents disowned them.  There were others whose parents completely accepted them.  Some people struggled for years with it.  Others seemed to have always known and accepted it.  There was romance.  There was heartbreak.  I sat down and for the first time ever, really thought about my own experience coming to terms with my sexual orientation, and wrote it down for this kid, and the whole world to see.  I could sense that something…wonderful…was happening.

It went on for two weeks.  We never heard a peep from the kid throughout that entire time.  And the stories, from all over the world, from people in all walks of life, just kept coming and coming.  We all began talking to each other, seeing common threads in our lives that we all had, which set us apart from the heterosexual majority.  Seeing those things that made each of us unique and at the same time those things we all seemed to share, no matter where we lived, no matter what culture we were raised in.  Then the kid spoke up one last time:

Thank you.  You’ve all given me a lot to think about. 

That was it.  We never heard another word from him.  Maybe we gave him what he needed to accept himself.  Maybe he was just confused about his own awakening sexuality, and what it meant to be homosexual.  At that age, who knows?  Maybe he wasn’t what he represented himself to be.  But as I watched that event unfold I realized that apart from this one Dutch teenager, there had to also be hundreds of others, all over the world, generation upon generation, watching that conversation, hungry for those same answers to that kid’s question.  And I saw then what this new technology could do for us as a people.  We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes.

When I came out to myself in 1971, nearly everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, I’d learned from heterosexuals.  In those days, before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, before Blogs and MySpace and Facebook, what you knew depended in large measure on what the popular media wanted to tell you.  Before cable TV, there were only three TV networks.  You had your local newspaper.  You had your local radio stations.  You had whatever books and magazines the local stores were selling.  And that was it basically.  I had to struggle, in a way most of you reading this now probably never had to, to dig up anything factual, anything at all, about homosexuality.  The image the popular media put forward of homosexuals was relentlessly negative.  We were perverts.  We were psychotic deviants.  We were dangerous, deranged sexual predators.  We raped children and then murdered them.  We skulked the shadows looking for unwitting victims.  Even we didn’t enjoy the sex we were having.  We were mentally ill, psychotic, perverted, sexual compulsives, unable to keep ourselves from engaging in horrible, vile, deviant sex acts that repulsed even us.  There is a film, The Detective, about a homosexual murder: watch the murderer’s tortured confession at the end to see what sick monsters the popular media viewed us as being back then.

Now, it seemed in the blink of an eye, all of that had been swept away.  Maybe not from the eyes of our heterosexual neighbors, but critically, finally, from our own.  We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes.  You have to appreciate how revolutionary that was back then. 

And the revolution continues…

Internet project helps gay youth ‘come out’

For young gay people, just coming out to friends and family can be a difficult thing.

Now a new online project is encouraging people to tell the world about their sexuality by uploading video images.

Analysts in Australia say sites like YouTube and Facebook are prompting people to come out of the closet at a younger age than ever before.

One woman in a YouTube video describes her own journey in a message done alone in the privacy of a house, but now being broadcast to the world.

"I came out at 19 years old, when I kissed a woman for the first time," she says in the video.

"While kissing her, I distinctly remember thinking two things – one, this is awesome, and two, my mother can never know."

The online video is in response to a campaign being run by the American organization Human Rights Campaign.

As part of National Coming Out Day this month, it is asking people to post video messages online telling their story.

There are now dozens of online videos that are being posted on the website YouTube, and there are thousands of messages of support.

And every day more people add their voices…

Voices.  Peterson Toscano has been collecting a few over at his blog, and at Beyond Ex-Gay…

Ex-Gay Survivor Vince Tells His Story

Vince Cervantes, an ex-gay survivor and one of the this year’s Soulforce Equality Riders (and an attender of this summer’s Ex-Gay Survivor Conference), has been sharing his experiences on his blog and through video. In the following two videos he goes into detail about the reasons he pursued a variety of ex-gay therapies and ministries. He really captures the mindset, the motivations and the conflicts that many us experienced when we lived ex-gay lives.

Now we can tell our stories via Internet TV.  While the corporate news media is still telling itself its comfortable lies about us, we can tell our own stories, in our own words, to each other, no matter where we live, no matter what our circumstances are.  And to anyone who wants to hear it from us, as opposed to heterosexuals talking to each other.  You want to know why the gay rights struggle has made so much progress, so quickly, this is why.  It isn’t the decline of civilization.  It isn’t falling moral standards.  It isn’t rampant godlessness.  Once upon a time the only image we had of ourselves was the mask heterosexuals made from their own sexual guilt and paranoia to make us wear.  Once upon a time they could make us hate ourselves.  If you understand nothing else about the gay rights struggle, understand this: those days are over. 

They were waning as it was, thanks to the changes brought about after world war II.  Jet air travel.  Interstate highways.  Greater mobility.  We could migrate to where it was safer for us to live.  There was already a critical mass developing in the major urban centers of America and the western world, to push for change.  Where we could live together in relative peace, we could see ourselves as we were, not as the scarecrows of other people’s sexual fears and self loathings.  But then the personal computer came along, and computer networks with them, and suddenly no matter where you lived, no matter how isolated you thought you were, you could reach out in an instant, in a heartbeat, and connect to a community of other gay people.  All over the country.  All over the world.  And what we saw when we did that, were not monsters, but people.  The first person you come out to is yourself.  The first eyes you open to the truth are yours.  Your own story is a part of that truth.  Every time you share it with another, you defeat hate.